Prime Minister Narendra Modi is not coming back to power and the Congress is winning the Lok Sabha polls, party chief Rahul Gandhi claimed on Thursday.
“Well, what is pretty clear is we are winning the elections. We are doing better, if you look at the numbers coming from the first four phases, the BJP is not winning the elections. That is pretty clear. It is clear as that at least our data for four stages is showing that Narendra Modi and the BJP are not coming back,” Gandhi told news channel NDTV in an interview.
Claiming that in Uttar Pradesh, “a secular formation was going to win whether it is BSP, SP, or Congress”, he denied that his party was dividing the anti-BJP votes in the crucial state which sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha.
“Wherever we don’t have a strong candidate, we are giving help to the BSP-SP (which are fighting in alliance). We’re saying okay, we’re going to harm the BJP. Where we have solid candidates, we are fighting for our space,” he said.
Gandhi said he had told Congress General Secretaries Priyanka Gandhi and Jyotiraditya Scindia, who are in charge of eastern and western UP respectively, that “our primary aim is to defeat the BJP, so in places where we are not going to win, we’ll help the (SP-BSP) gathbandan”.
He also said the Congress had successfully conveyed the idea that Prime Minister Modi was helping the corrupt and there was “massive unemployment in the country in the country, massive farmer disenchantment and farmer suicides”.
On the slogan “chowkidar chor hai” issue, Gandhi said that he made a mistake and apologised for it before the Supreme Court.
“I made a mistake in a conversation like this, in the heat of the moment. I made a mistake, a genuine mistake where I said the Supreme Court has said this… and that is not part of the Supreme Court process yet. So I put words in the mouth of the Supreme Court and frankly that…I was wrong, so I apologised,” he said, adding that he was not wrong on the slogan though.
“But I am not apologising in the least for the slogan ‘chowkidar chor hai’… No way,” he said.
